So the Pew Foundation's Project for Excellence in Journalism just issued its annual "State of the Media" report.
And the big news of the piece is the power of Fox. But don't take The Cable Gamer's word for it, just go to the summary introduction:
Fox, whose talk show hosts promote a populist brand of conservatism, further distanced itself from the competition. Its prime-time viewership was nearly bigger than both CNN’s and MSNBC’s combined. It has almost erased CNN’s advantage in “cume,” the number of viewers it draws from over the course of a month.
Fox surpassed CNN in profit and revenue, as well, and was closing in fast in the amount it can charge for advertising per thousand viewers, after years of having to discount the price of its ads. This is all the more striking given that CNN’s figures include those of its sister channel, HLN. Even farther behind these channels was MSNBC, whose profits and revenues were half that of CNBC’s, the other news channel owned by NBC Universal.
One place where CNN still leads Fox is online. But although Foxnews.com attracts significantly fewer unique visitors per month than its cable news rivals, its audience tends to be the most loyal.
What is less certain is whether cable news, like talk radio, will be a conservative-dominated medium. More than half of people watching cable news at any given moment are watching Fox, a share that more and more is mirroring the audience for conservative versus liberal talkers on radio.
Other highlights:
Financially, CNN and HLN remained static, not necessarily a bad thing given the challenges facing other media in 2009. Profits (up 1% to $475.5 million) and revenues (down 1% to $1.18 billion) were basically flat, as was overall news investment (down 2.5% to $703.4 million).
By contrast, Fox achieved growth across nearly all key metrics. Its audiences were up by nearly a quarter in both prime time (2.13 million viewers) and daytime (1.2 million viewers). Its profits (up 19% to $534.8 million) and revenues (up 14% to $1.21 billion) grew substantially. The channel’s news investment was up 10% to $674 million.
Indeed, the report dealt pretty heavily on economics: While Fox has long been a leader in eyeballs, for the first time, Fox News was clearly on top.
While all three cable news operations — CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC — were projected to increase their profits, at CNN and MSNBC the gains were a negligible 1%.1 Only Fox was projected to increase total revenues, and to do so substantially.
Fox was projected to again outpace CNN in advertising revenue, but also to eclipse it for the first time in profit and in the average license fee per subscriber.
And this:
Fox News was expected to lead not only in percentage growth, but also in total profit in 2009. There have been years when analysts erroneously projected that Fox would eclipse CNN/HLN’s profits. But the margin by which Fox is projected to exceed CNN/HLN this year is $59 million—the biggest it has ever been.
Another interesting note:
For the first time in years, CNN also cut back on newsgathering, its primary competitive advantage over its rivals.
But the whole report from PEJ is worth a look.
